Once discussed the economic myths on immigration in our previous entry, we need to examine the moral and national security grounds to reform the present immigration system. As among the xenophobic Right main arguments are that "we are a nation of laws" and that "amnesty would be unfair for those who did not skip their place in the line", we need to examine whether their moral standard is the same as that of the Founding Fathers, what is the moral standard valid for this discussion and even whether or not they have their own Jesus. Nevertheless, while the xenophobic Right likes to dress up itself in phony moral values to condemn illegal immigrants, the so-called pro-immigrant leaders not only tacitly accept that imaginary moral stain but also, deaf to the spirit of the Founders, ridiculously invoke the unfeasibility of massive deportations as moral argument. In other words, "We accept that we are criminals but as you cannot punish all of us, you will have to let us get smart with you and get away with our crime". I do not you, but it does not seem a good line of defense to me. I humbly offer to these reading-allergic leaders an alternative point of view.
What moral values to use to evaluate our present immigration system? Remembering the Freedom Riders and the case of Alexander Hamilton
A discussion about moral values seems to be a very subjective one. Even Christian values are not the same across the many Christian churches. The Christian values that inspired Martin Luther King are not the same values that inspire the Christian Right. While the former puts its accent on social justice, there main topics of the latter is abortion and gay marriage. In the Christian Right there are even churches that have their own Caucasian Jesus. In our society we have a mosaic of religious, politic, ethnic and in general social values but when we are talking about our constitutional system, there is a moral core that settles the moral standard on which we can judge the morality of our legislation.
Along our history, that moral core has suffered some attacks that have even temporarily dislocated our Constitution from that core but they have been at the end unsuccessful. The Anti-Saloon League, face of the conservative intemperance movement, got the Prohibition introduced into the Constitution through the XVIII Amendment in 1919 but our Constitutional system ended up rejecting that strange piece of legislation and through the XXI Amendment the XVIII Amendment was repealed in 1933. The Prohibition was another ill-conceived conservative attempt to ban a legitimate market. While in the Prohibition the banned market was one of final goods, alcohol, in the case of immigration, scapegoat is part of the labor market. The Prohibition’s legacy was the corruption of the local politics [Remember that Al Capone even got Thompson elected as mayor of Chicago], the birth of the organized crime and. Worse, the discredit of the concept of the law as people extendedly continued seeking a product that, although illegal, they still considered legitimate. This last effect is similar to what we see everyday on immigration but the legacy of the anti-immigrant attempts [including one to amend the XIV Amendment to strip of citizenship the children of illegal immigrants born in America] could be even worse: a Hispanic community alienated from the mainstream and seduced by demagogues skilled in the Latin American ways of making politics and policy. If we consider that the Hispanic community could be deciding elections in 40 years, this possibility looks pretty scary. Today alcohol is a legitimate but regulated product according to our principle of economic freedom. Today immigration continues being ruled by criteria of cast, ignoring our principle of primacy of character.
The racial issue has been at the heart of many other examples of immoral laws. Thus we have the Fugitive Slave Acts and the Jim Crow. After all, the White supremacist, different from their ancestors in the 30s, and 40s, invoked not racial supremacy as a value but their "way of life" and "the right of the states to self-determination" It is because the moral core of the Founders is in the fabric of America that the mainstream today accept that those pieces of legislation are immoral, that we remember Rosa Parks as a hero and not as a criminal and that we identify ourselves with the Freedom Raiders and not with the White supremacist goons who beat them in Alabama. Nevertheless, the light of that moral core has been hidden from us by decades of deception widespread by the xenophobic Right. Maybe the best intuitive example of this is the case of Alexander Hamilton.
Alexander Hamilton was maybe the most extraordinary of the Founders. He became the right arm of George Washington from the battlefield to the Presidency. As his secretary of Treasury; he created the National Bank and gave the newborn country the framework of his first government. He also was an active member of the Convention of Philadelphia that gave us our Constitution and was, with Madison, the main author of the Federalist, the main compendium of commentaries on the Constitution. Nevertheless, Hamilton, a lowborn and illegitimate child born in Neves, a Caribbean island, with no relatives in the United States, would have had a very hard time coming to America legally under the present law as relatives and country of origin are the two factors that explain the overwhelming majority of legal immigration. Actually, as he came to America as a poor student with the financial support of his former employers but with no commitment to return to Neves, he would probably would have had to lie to get a student visa or to come illegally. Nevertheless, this is the law the xenophobic Right uses as one of the moral flag of their commitment with values. Thus, either Hamilton must be rejected as an undesirable immigrant and Washington as his employer or the values of the xenophobic Right are just prejudices in disguise that have nothing to do with the moral core of the Founders. If at the end of our quest we find that that moral core embraces caste over character, the pro-immigrant cause is moral groundless; if not, the present immigration law is immoral and must be changed to abide by such moral core.
What moral standard?
The first document that can guide us to find that moral core is the Declaration of Independence. It begins saying: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." The Declaration of Independence does not say "all Citizens" or "all Native Born" but "all Men". It also denies caste as a legitimate discriminatory criterion when it says the "all Men are created equal". Later the Constitution retakes this spirit saying that the newborn Republic admits no title of nobility in the Section 8 of its Article 1.
One of the charges the Declaration of Independence contains against the King of Great Britain is his anti-immigrant policy: "He [the King of Great Britain] has endeavored to prevent the Population of these States; for that Purpose obstructing the Laws of Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migration hither, and raising the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands." Then and now, the anti-economic criteria of the King were condemned by the Declaration. To say that that argument was only valid while America was vastly unpopulated is ridiculous because what matters is the mismatch between capital (land/labor demand) and people (settlers/labor supply). Illegal immigration is the sad result of people born in the wrong castes who come to fill the positions the law does not allow to be filled legally.
Nevertheless, Alan Dershowitz [Dershowitz, Alan. America declares independence. New Jersey, 2003, pp. 226-227] notes that the words "all Men" and "equal" may not have had the meaning they have today, explaining the discrimination against women and minorities. Nevertheless, while the moral core of the Founders has struggle to enlighten our legislation in the last three centuries, we have not had any need to amend the Declaration of Independence to correct past discriminations against those groups, including previous waves of immigrants. Furthermore, even though we find come deviations among the Founders (Franklin was anti-immigrant and Jefferson was pro-segregation), we find that the common though not unanimous spirit was for rejecting any notion of caste, even though this concept has evolved itself across the centuries. Thus, John F Kennedy, in his 1963 speech ‘A Nation of Immigrants’ , while attacking the system of quotas, says: "‘This system is based upon the assumption that there is some reason for keeping the origins of our population in exactly the same proportions as they existed in 1920. Such an idea is at complete variance with the American traditions and principles that the qualification of an immigrant do not depend upon his country of birth, and violates the spirit expressed in the Declaration of Independence that ‘all men are created equal’."
In that same speech [1] Kennedy also says: "Restrictive immigration policies constituted one of the charges against King George III expressed in the Declaration of Independence. And in the Constitutional Convention James Madison noted, "That part of American which has encouraged them [the immigrants] has advanced most rapidly in population, agriculture and the arts." So, too, Washington in his Thanksgiving Day Proclamation of 1795 asked all Americans ‘humbly and fervently to beseech the kind Author of these blessings... to render this country more and more a safe and propitious asylum for the unfortunate of other countries."
Yet there was the basic ambiguity which older Americans have often shown toward newcomers. In 1797 a member of Congress argued that, while a liberal immigration policy was fine when the country was new and unsettled, now that America had reached its maturity and was fully populated, immigration should stop –an argument which has been repeated at regular intervals throughout American history...
By the turn of the century the opinion was becoming widespread that the numbers of new immigrants should be limited. Those who were opposed to all immigration and all ‘foreigners’ were now joined by those who believed sincerely, and with some basis of fact, that America’s capacity to absorb immigration was limited. This movement toward restricting immigration represented a social and economic reaction, not only to the tremendous increase in immigration after 1880, but also to the shift in its main sources, to Southern, Eastern and Southeastern Europe.’
And:
‘The permanent system, which went into force in 1929, includes essentially all the elements of immigration policy that are in our law today. The immigration statutes now establish a system of annual quotas to govern immigration from each country. (...) The quotas from each country are based upon the national origins of the population of the United States in 1920. (...) In an age of interdependence among nations such a system is an anachronism, for it discriminates among applicants for admission into the United States on the basis of accident of birth.’"
In 1862 President Abraham Lincoln’s attorney general wrote an opinion for the secretary of the treasury asserting ‘[a]s far as I know... you and I have no better title to the citizenship which we enjoy than the ‘accident of birth’ –the fact that we happened to be born in the United States.’"[3]
Maybe the only one difference between the anti-immigrant arguments then and now is that then the alleged "superiority of Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic races" was more explicitly voiced. What is important though is how the notions of caste and discrimination are identified as contrary to the moral core of the founders.
Even though the Constitution rejected any title of nobility, it accepted the notion of slavery and so of caste until the Civil War and, due to Andrew Johnson shortcomings, to the Civil Rights movement. Christopher and James L. Collier explain the position of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 saying that the admission of slavery (and no taxation of exports) in the Constitution with even a count of 3/5 for each slave to increase the representation of the South was the price the North paid to the Connecticut-South axis for the South to accept proportional representation and lifting a two thirds minimum qualified vote to regulate navigation. Furthermore, many on the side of the North viewed slavery as a decaying institution that would anyway die by itself:
"Once again it was the Connecticut men who broke ranks with their northern neighbors. At the close of debate on August 21 Oliver Ellsworth, who had been on the Committee of Detail, said, "The morality or wisdom of slavery are considerations belonging to the states themselves." And the first thing the next morning , August 22, Roger Sherman said that although the disapproved of the slave trade, the "public good" did not require its prohibition, and he "thought it best to leave the matter" as it was, in order not to drive the South out of the Union. He added that slavery was dying out anyway and would by degrees disappear. Connecticut would continue to support the Deep South.
It was a Virginian, the prickly George Mason, who rose to make a strong speech against the slave trade."
As we said, it took a bloody Civil War and another 100 years to correct the Andrew Johnson’s missteps to retake the moral principles of the Founders. The Courts also took part in this quest for the position of the spirit of the Founders in the dichotomy caste-character. Kelly, Harbison and Belz [4] follow this evolution, whose most important moment is the Fourteenth Amendment [5].
Fist we have the Alien Act, the Alien Enemy Act and the Sedition Act. Jefferson attacked basically the first two arguing that its real aim was "French and pro-French foreigners in the United States, who were virtually unanimous in their support of the Republican party." Then in 1857 the infamous decision of Chief Justice Taney denied Dred Scott his citizenship on the grounds of race in contradiction to accepted doctrines of constitutional law. The Dred Scott decision struck at the Republican party’s constitutional rationale, forcing antislavery men to denounce the opinion as obiter dictum or to question the authority of the Supreme Court as final arbiter of constitutional disputes.
Then we have the Civil Rights Act of 1866, based on the Thirteenth Amendment, and, as among several Republicans doubt persisted about the sufficiency of this constitutional basis, the Fourteenth Amendment. The Fourteenth Amendment nationalized the protection of civil rights, avoiding the Southern states use of state sovereignty as an excuse to ignore the civil rights of minorities as the old South had used that excuse in the past to protect slavery.
The equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment should have been enough but the process began by Andrew Johnson during the Reconstruction ended up in the infamous Jim Crow system. Two Supreme Court decisions had extended the Plessy doctrine of separate but equal to public schools and the constitutionality of the school segregation (mandatory in 18 states and permitted in other 6) had suspended de factor the Fourteenth Amendment.
Development in social sciences discrediting pseudoscientific works that tried to demonstrate the inferiority of the black race and the World Wars began to open the doors for a more definite enlightenment of this issue at the light of the moral core of the Founders. Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938) was the first decision of the Court rejecting racial discrimination in the admission system of an educational institution but did not rejected the separate-but-equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson. The Court merely found that Negro students had a right to access to a white educational institution where no separate but equal facility existed for blacks. It took until 1954, the first Brown v. Board of Education decision, to overrule the doctrine of separate but equal, at least in education. The desegregation decision was the signal for a general attack by civil rights organizations on the state laws providing for mandatory racial segregation in public parks, swimming pools, theaters, athletic contests, and the like. As the Brown decision prescribed a progressive desegregation of the school system, many Southern states resisted even violently the implementation of the decision for at least another decade. A first step to stop segregation in housing was Shelley v. Kraemer, where the Court had held that privately negotiated restrictive covenants were in themselves not illegal but that any attempt to enforce them in the courts automatically became state action invalid under the equal protection clause. The culmination of this process was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that revived the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (which had already banned "discrimination or segregation" due to "race, color, religion or national origin").
The Supreme Court even revered its own decision on the poll tax, declaring it unconstitutional in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections (1966)
Other examples of temporary discrimination based on caste were the Chinese Exclusion Act that banned Chinese immigration in the late XIX Century and, much later, the "Relocation Centers", detention camps created in 1942 to detain Japanese-Americans, although they had been convicted of no offense, for up to four years and then resettle them outside the Pacific coastal area. Different from Americans of German or Italian descent, Japanese American disloyalty did not have to be proved to justify the internment. This unfortunate episode was justified by the Supreme Court on the war powers of the President in times of war in Hirabayashi v. United States (1943) and in Konematsu v. United States (1944) [6]
Andrew Jackson represents many abuses and violated treaties for Native Americas. Nevertheless, although in the late 1960s and early 1970s the Negro civil rights movement helped stimulate a protest movement and heightened rights consciousness among native Americans, the theory of affirmative action formed the basis of federal Indian policy long before the civil rights movement began, long before the term "affirmative action" was coined and during many failed integration and self-determination policies during the XX century.
In controversies over women’s rights, which gained prominence in the atmosphere of rights consciousness created by the civil rights movement, the Burger Court generally adhered to a traditional conception of equality before the law. Responding to changes in public attitudes and to legislative initiatives against sex discrimination, the Court seriously weakened the principle of classification by gender that formed the legal basis for long-standing federal and state-sanctioned denial of equal rights to women. Before the 1960s, women were generally excluded from voting, office-holding, and jury service, denied educational and professional opportunities available to men, and in numerous ways defined as the subordinate partner in the marriage relationship. Nor did the Fourteenth Amendment, which temporarily raised feminist hopes of a major advance toward legal and political equality, alter this pattern of discrimination. Going beyond statutory interpretation, the Supreme Court in other cases applied the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment and the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, respectively, to strike down state and federal laws that rested on gender classifications found to be injurious to women. In Reed v. Reed, Chief Justice Burger explained that legislation differentiating between the sexes, in order to be constitutional, "must be reasonable, not arbitrary, and must rest upon some ground of difference having a fair and substantial relation to the object of the legislation,"
In decisions Shapiro v. Thompson (1969) and Goldberg v. Kelly (1970), the Warren Court got even close to accept the "new property theory", which tried to level the living conditions of the lower class despite the more active social mobility of the 60s so reaching the border between the notions of caste and class. Nevertheless, in Dandridge v. Williams (1970) Justice Stewart considered the issues were not civil liberties or civil rights, but with "state regulation in the social and economic field" and that the classification embodied in a state program (categories of families differentiated by degrees of wealth) did not violate the equal protection clause and was not constitutionally suspect. In San Antonio School District v. Rodriguez (1973) the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision recognized the principle that wealth discrimination was not a suspect classification requiring strict scrutiny of a state action employing it as the Texas school financing system did not discriminate against any social class. Nevertheless, Justice Powell contended that education was not a fundamental right, explicitly or implicitly guaranteed by the Constitution. Accordingly, strict scrutiny of the challenged state action was not required. What was at issue, said Powell, was social and economic legislation that warranted simply the rationality test. In rejecting a broader application of the equal protection and due process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment as instruments of social reform, the Burger Court showed its willingness to defer to the states in key areas of social policy. While the Burger Court resisted the drive for egalitarian social reforms and encouraged state autonomy in the general sphere of social and economic policy, it supported and extended the rationale of federal affirmative action developed by the Warren Court to deal with race-related civil rights questions. In Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971) the Supreme Court unanimously approved a variety of means, including busing, for achieving a proper racial mixture in public schools.
Despite its ambiguity with respect to economic rights, the Supreme Court furthermore accepted a concept of affirmative action in employment practices and higher education admissions that provided preferential, or compensatory, treatment for blacks. Indicative of such acceptance, the Burger Court in 1980 sanctioned a racially preferential policy for awarding federal contracts [7]. Furthermore, Burger said, the remedial means chosen by Congress –a race-conscious quota system- was acceptable because in a remedial context Congress need not act in a wholly color-blind manner. Burger cited the school desegregation cases to support this point.
Thus, we see a trend converging to a principle of no discrimination on the basis of caste and the recognition of character as a value compatible with the moral core of the Founders. This is then the main argument to consider the immigration law, a law that rewards caste and pays practically no attention to character, as immoral. It seems that immigrants’ and homosexuals’ rights will be the next fight in this path to the moral core of the Founders.
Children of illegal immigrants born in America
It is necessary to make a small mention to a side issue: the children of illegal immigrants born in America. It is important to mention this case because one of the flags of the xenophobic Right has been advocating for stripping this children from their American nationality by amending the Fourteenth Amendment.
Walter Dellinger and Barbara Jordan [8] have made important contributions to this discussion. While the Constitution recognized citizenship of the United States in prescribing the qualifications for president, senators, and representatives, it contained no definition of citizenship until the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868.
Under the common law of England, which was adopted by the United States, every child born within the territory of alien parents was a natural-born subject, with the exception of children born of foreign ambassadors, of alien enemies during hostile occupation and of aliens on a foreign vessel. The Fourteenth Amendment followed this criterion with the single additional exception of children of members of the Indian tribes owing direct allegiance to their several tribes.
In United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court held that a child born in San Francisco of Chinese parents (who, under the Chinese Exclusion laws then in effect, could never themselves become US citizens) became at the time of his birth in the United States a citizen of the United States, by virtue of the Fourteenth Amendment. After considering the effects of both sources of law, the Court held that Wong Kim Ark had become a citizen at birth by virtue of the Fourteenth Amendment, reaffirming the constitutional principle that ‘[t]he Fourteenth Amendment, while it leaves the power, where it was before, in Congress, to regulate naturalization, has conferred no authority upon Congress to restrict the effect of birth, declared by the Constitution to constitute a sufficient and complete right to citizenship".
The Dred Scott decision taught us that America should never again trust judges or politicians the power to deprive from a class born on our soil the right of citizenship; that no discretion should be exercised by public officials on whether or not one came from the right caste, or race, or lineage, or bloodline in establishing American citizenship.
Barbara Jordan notices that in Germany, where you can only be German if your ancestors were German, there are hundreds of thousands of second and third generations of people born in Germany, knowing no other nation, but who are not German and never will be so Congress should think again whether you wish to make the United States more like Germany because the United States must not be a country where citizens are the privileged elite and foreigners do the dirty work.
For obvious reasons, at the moment of birth it is not possible to determine whether or not a person is worthy of the American citizenship so a discussion about character cannot have place at this moment. For a time in which the quota system had biased the immigration law even more than today in favor of Northwestern European immigration for obvious racial reasons, the Fourteenth Amendment was an important protection for children of non-white immigrants and another step against using caste as a criterion to select future Americans.
While the Supreme Court, extending to immigration the treatment given to international trade, reserved for the federal government the jurisdiction to regulate immigration [9], there is an important difference. An imported barrel of oil does not become your neighbor or votes with you in future elections but immigrants do and an important part of them become future Americans. Not only you cannot pretend to have a nation based on character if an important part of future Americans are chosen using caste as a criterion but also, as we have seen, the moral core of the Founders is completely contrary to the use of caste.
Religion and moral values: The case of the Christian Identity Church
Whether or not you are a Christian, you cannot ignore the importance of Christendom for America since its very foundation. Nevertheless, if you say to be backed by Christian values, you are bound by the definition made of those Christian values by the Bible. You are not entitled to your own Jesus.
The main flags of the Christian Right are the persecution of homosexuals and the abortion of abortion rights. Even though the Old Testament establishes that the punishment for the man who had sex with another man is death, that sin is not the only one punished with such punishment. Nevertheless, the main parts of the Old Testament are not the long genealogic lines or the dietetic restrictions of the five Mosaic Books but the Ten Commandments (Exodus, 20:1-17). None of these Commandments mention the gay issue and really none of them mention the abortion issue either [10].
In the New Testament, again, the Greatest Commandment (Luke 10:25-28; Matthew 22:34-40; Mark 12:31-46) says "You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart..., and your neighbor as yourself" but does not bash homosexuals or abortion. It actually may back a pro-immigrant argument unless you find a reason to exclude Third World immigrants from the list of your neighbors as the immigration law and anti-immigrant Congressmen do. So James Sensenbrenner finds ethical to encourage Australian immigration while criminalizing illegal immigrants, whose real fault was to be born in the wrong family, country or social class. If you come from certain Northwestern European countries, you can come legally since the very first day but if you were born in a Third World country, you are poor and have no relatives here, you are no the ‘neighbor’ of these so-called Christians. Likewise, the Sermon on the Plain (Luke 6:20-26) does not apply to immigrants either and it hardly applies even to poor Americans. The phrase "Whatever you did for one of these the least brothers of mine, you did for me" (Matthew 35:31-46) said by Jesus meaning that the way to honor him was to help those in more need, like those who risk their lives in the dessert to achieve a better life, does not apply to Third World immigrants either.
Actually not only biblical but also historic references should make of Christians the first pro-immigrants of the country. The first Christians were illegal in the Roman Empire. Had they confused morality with legality, they would have preferred to be law abiding subjects or citizens, abandon Jesus and adore the Emperor. Christian preachers were persecuted in red China for years. Had they suffered from the same confusion, they would have preferred to abandon their mission while it remained illegal in China. If that kind of confusion had been suffered by our Founding Fathers, there would be no America as they would have abided by the regime of the King of England. The fight against the Jim Crow was another chapter in which the moral core of the Founders found its way precisely fighting against the immorality of the legal system of the moment.
Why such a selective confusion between legality and morality? Why such a selective reading of the Bible? Why so-called patriots do not make the connections and realize that they argument would condemn the Founding Fathers in the first place? The answer is a pretty human one. People have values and prejudices and over them they associate some ideas using a line of reasoning but are incapable or unwilling of making the same associations with other ideas that would deserve the same connection according to that same line of reasoning. In other words, as people are not 100% rational, they cannot escape this selective association of ideas. In most of the cases, they are incapable of being coherent in their association of ideas due to massive disinformation and weakness to the seductive words of the charlatans that appeal to the stereotypes forged in certain social groups to favor them. This is the case of race during the fight of the Civil Rights movement and is the case of immigration now. There is tough a group in which the incoherent associations are willingly made and this is the xenophobic Right that has poisoned the debate on immigration for decades. To persuade the first group more easily, they hide the hideous assumptions that would let that first group, for which racism is a temptation but rejected as shameful when recognized as such, make the connections this second group wants to prevent them to make. Thus, while the mainstream would reject pretty quickly the anti-immigrant arguments of David Duke, they would be more willing to listen to Pat Buchanan and even a bit more to Tom Coburn or John Cornin. Nevertheless, the difference between David Duke and the rest is that David Duke explicitly says that Third World immigration should be rejected due to their race because race determine culture and that is why these represent a danger for the White culture. In the other three, that line of reasoning remains as an unsaid assumption that sustains silently their lines of reasoning. In the case of the last three, while Buchanan feels no embarrassment of his own bizarre theories of Reconquista, Cornin and Coburn try to hide behind the idea of the sanctity of the law but avoiding at any moment to discuss the morality of this specific law at the light of the moral core of the Founders. Thus, there is not a fundamental difference between Duke, Buchanan, Cornin and Coburn on this issue; just a matter of degrees and presentation for their respective audiences. That is why we state that these second group do not represent values but prejudices in disguise. About the strategy to help the first group to see their mistake at the light of the moral core of the Founders, I have extensively written in previous entries and I will not repeat the lines of that plan here.
What is the Christian Identity Church? The Church of groups like the KKK, that states that Jesus was Caucasian, that Jews are Satan's children and that other inferior races are "mud" people. Far Right movements have about 30,000 members in America under different denominations and this church, led by Rev. Richard Butler, has unified these groups. Do you see? Some of them even have their own Jesus.
Finally, if you are a Christian American, while the law cannot force your beliefs, you cannot force the values of the country, set in that moral core of the Founders we have mentioned so many times, because part of that core is the value of tolerance with no Christian values no opposed to that moral core.
Riots in France and immigration in America (11/30/05)
This section is based on my article of the same name of November 30, 2005.
The riots in France of the last quarter of 2005
It is not a coincidence that our xenophobic Right shares its anti-immigrant flag with the European extreme Right. In France, its leader is Jean Marie LePen. The French Right showed it learned nothing from the sort of apartheid that alienated the Arabs in the Casbah, Alger, ending up in Alger independence in the 1960s, basically repeating the story of Indochina. Self-deceived by the paratroopers’ victory in the Casbah in the mid 1950s, for the moment the French government woke up, the FLN had already won and was not interested in the French offer of being an associate state and was not interested in anything but independence.
Even though job segregation against Muslims in France is not the whole problem, it is an important one. The Kurds is one of the most pro-Western peoples in the Middle East. A Kurd leader interviewed by Mario Vargas Llosa for the Spanish newspaper El País said that a man with a job has less time to spend at the Mosque. An important historian said that Arabs look at their past because they have nothing on which to take pride in the present or the future. Unfortunately, the French preferred to focus on second order variables when they prohibited head-scarves in schools. Doing so they helped the extremists create symbols for an alienated subculture of resistance. Far from helping the so-called goal of integration, it led to the opposite result. Alienated from the West by the West, Iranians elected the extremist mayor of Tehran and Egyptians have given the Muslim Brotherhood more power in Congress.
In the case of the 12 million illegal immigrants living now in the United States, their legalization is a chance for assimilating and integrating those minorities and to set a new standard: the green card is something you have to DESERVE with a commitment to learn English and volunteer so, as the Founding Fathers dreamt, America be a place where men are judged by their character. We can always deviate from the moral core of the Founders and chose the model of segregated castes of David Duke, the famous KKK leader and Louisiana politician, but worldwide experiences show us where it leads to.
Many of the final answer France has given to the problem only promises to make the problem even worse in the next years: As France initially preferred to focus in head-scarves instead of in the labor market, now it is focusing in making harder for those minorities to live as immigrants in France. If the French government had required a commitment to learn French and it tested fairly such commitment, it would not only avoided the problems related to the alienation of Arabs but only it would have reduced the problem to the marginal size of the disenfranchised minority to those who failed their tests and commitments. If the French government proposal would have required those Muslims to volunteer for a certain number of hours in French institutions (from the library to political parties) as a condition for the government to help them to get jobs, many extremists would have found it harder to sell the idea of discrimination to gain support for their jihad. Instead, the French government proposal makers harder for French immigrants to bring their families and promises make even harder the lives of immigrants even though the riots were not the exclusive work of immigrants. The most probable outcome is going to be a growing resentment among Muslims, immigrants or not, legal or not, being particularly dangerous the way this proposal alienates immigrant Muslim students.
Do you find any useful lessons for America?
The need to preserve the mainstream culture despite the attacks of the xenophobic Right
Finally, it is worth to mention one last time an extremely important point. One of the bogeymen invoked by the xenophobic Right is the change to our culture resulting from the present predominantly non-white wave of immigration. As we have seen before, the hidden assumption is that race determines culture. Actually there could be some truth in those accusations but as a result of their xenophobic attitude instead of due to some genetic inability of immigrants for assimilation.
Italian and Poles were subject to quotas because they were not considered white enough and so immigrants of those origins coming around the end of the XIX Century were rejected and discriminated. It is not a coincidence that organized crime in immigrant communities has survived the best in those communities among the most rejected immigrant communities and this is true from Little Italy to Little Odessa. Rejection produced alienation but the Americanization of the second generation and the politically small size of those communities limited their political influence. In the case of the Hispanic community, its demographic growth and the effect of globalization on commerce and immigration is going to make of the Hispanic community a politically decisive force in 40 years. If we let the irresponsibility of the xenophobic Right alienate that community, we risk surrendering Hispanics to demagogues skilled in the Latin American ways of making policy and politics. Alienated communities usually reject assimilation and shelter themselves in the cultural patterns they know and even if they realize that it has been those cultural patterns which push them to emigrate in the first place, the rejection of the native-born can make those patterns not to look that bad after all.
We cannot stop the flows of immigration because they result from economic and demographic trends we cannot ignore but we can always regulate such a flow to make it keep pace with the needs of the labor market and with our need to keep our mainstream culture in the path of the moral core of the Founders. We people are basically irrational and many times are seduced by people who deviates us from the moral core, but if we love America, there are no excuses to keep turning our backs to the Founding Fathers. It is time to choose between their moral core and the prejudices in disguise of the xenophobic Right.
End Notes
[1] Other important parts of the same speech are:
‘As President Truman said when he vetoed the Immigration and Nationality Act (only to have that veto overridden): "The idea behind this discriminatory policy was, to put it boldly, that Americans with English or Irish names were better people and better citizens than Americans with Italian or Greek or Polish names... Such a concept is utterly unworthy of our traditions and our ideals...".’
‘Instead of using the discriminatory test of where the immigrant was born, the reform proposals would based admission on the immigrant’s possession of skills our country needs and on the humanitarian ground of reuniting families. Such legislation does not seek to make over the face of America. Immigrants would still be given tests for health, intelligence, morality and security...’
‘Such a policy would be but a reaffirmation of old principles. It would be an expression of our agreement with George Washington that "The bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent and respectable stranger but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions; whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges, if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment.’
[2] Christopher Collier and James Lincoln Collier, Decision in Philadelphia. The Constitutional Convention of 1787. New York, 1987. Pp. 226-227 and 231.
[3] Walter Dellinger, Social and legal issues surrounding the children born in the United States to illegal alien parents. Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims and Subcommittee on the Constitution, Committee on the Judiciary. House of Representatives, 104th Congress, 1st. session. December 13, 1995
[4] Alfred H. Kelly, Winfred A. Harbison, and Herman Belz. The American Constitution, its origins & development. New York, 1983. Pp. 135, 277, 283, 341-344, 563-565, 606-633 and 705-717.
[5] XIV Amendment (Ratified July 9, 1868)
Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
XV Amendment (Ratified February 3, 1870)
Section 1. The rights of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
[6] In earlier cases, Justice Stone pointed out, discrimination based upon race had been irrelevant to the national welfare; in the present case, race was not irrelevant, and Congress, therefore, had a right to take it into account. Nevertheless, in Konematsu v. United States (1944) Justices Roberts, Murphy, and Jackson all entered vigorous dissents. Roberts thought it a plain "case of convicting a citizen as punishment for not submitting to imprisonment in a concentration camp, solely because of his ancestry," without evidence concerning his loyalty to the United States.
[7] The case, Fullilove v.Klutznick, concerned the constitutionality of the Public Works Employment Act of 1977, which required at least 10 percent of federal funds for public works projects to be spent on services or supplies from minority business enterprises. Non-minority contractors challenged the act on its face as a violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, but in a 6-3 decision the Supreme Court sustained the measure.
[8] Walter Dellinger. Op. cit.; Barbara Jordan, Testimony before the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims and the Subcommittee on the Constitution, December 13, 1995
[9] The Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution establishes that the Congress shall have power (...) to establish a uniform rule of naturalization. In the Federalist [Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison, The Federalist. New York 1788] number 32 of January 2, 1788, Hamilton says ‘[I]n that clause which declares that Congress shall have power "to establish an UNIFORM RULE of naturalization throughout the United States." This must necessarily be exclusive; because if each state had power to prescribe a DISTINCT RULE, there could be no UNIFORM RULE.’ In The Federalist number 42 of January 22,1788, Madison says that ‘The dissimilarity in the rules of naturalization has long been remarked as a fault in our system, and as laying a foundation for intricate and delicate questions. In the fourth article of the Confederation, it is declared "that the free inhabitants of each of these States, paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives from justice excepted, shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several States; and the people of each State shall, in every other, enjoy all the privileges of trade and commerce".’
It is worth the pain to notice that ‘migration’ of the Section 9 of the same Article 1 (‘The migration or importation of such persons as any of the sates now existing shall think proper to admit shall not be prohibited by Congress prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight") is referred not to immigration but to slave trade.
[10] While it is true that it is forbidden to kill, what it means is that it is forbidden to kill another person. The Commandments do not establish that a fetus is a person or forbid suicide. While "Pro-life" Christians have not answer for the second point, with respect to the first one, they say that abortion is included in the "Don’t Kill" Commandment because somewhere else in the Bible God says "I knew you in the womb of your mother". Actually this proves nothing because the passage does not says when he knows you in the womb of your mother. That period could extend from second before your birth to the end of the third month of your conception and be in no contradiction with Roe v. Wade.